Utilization of the Internet continues to rise at a rapid pace. Indeed, business and governmental entities as well as individuals are increasingly relying upon the Internet for research, communication, entertainment and transactional purposes. Access to the Internet network is provided by Internet servers. Such servers are typically maintained by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who offers “use” of its servers to customers on a pre-determined, subscription basis. Basically, an ISP is a business or organization that sells access to the internet and other related services.
Furthermore, electronic mail (email) is used by many people. Recipients can also reply to or forward the email and can opt to include an attachment as part of a replying or forwarding function. Forwarding the email includes creating a new email that includes the contents of the original email to additional addressees & recipients. The forwarding party (i.e. the recipient of the original email) can also edit the email. Replying to the email includes forwarding the email to one or more of the other addresses and/or the sender of the email.
In addition, email allows mail messages to be exchanged between users of computers around the world and out of the world, to space shuttles and the International Space Station. Internet email in particular provides a standard communications mechanism for millions of computers connected to the Internet. In the early days of email, email messages were very limited in features. They were restricted to ASCII characters; they had maximum line lengths and maximum message lengths. Modern email messages, however, support digital objects comprising audio, video, and graphic images. The modern email standard for the Internet, initiated in 1992, is called MIME, an acronym for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME allows mail messages to contain multiple digital objects in a single message, text having unlimited line length or overall length, character sets other than ASCII (allowing non-English language messages), multi-font messages, and binary or application specific files. Email messages are delivered to email clients, software application programs capable of connecting to the Internet through mail servers and downloading email messages from electronic mailboxes maintained in email servers.
Access to information and movement around the Internet is enhanced through the use of hyperlinks (“links”) within a web page's hypertext markup language (HTML). The link, which is typically a word in a text field or an image on a web page, acts as a path that moves a user from one web page address, Uniform Resource Locator (URL), to another web page address on a web site. The movement from one URL to another allows near-instant access to information, products, and services and is particularly well-suited to the exchange of information, goods, and services between buyers and sellers. Such business is commonly referred to as “e-commerce,” or “electronic commerce.”
The current state of e-commerce is a state of confusion; many people are losing a great deal of money. Only few make any profit, mostly due to a poor set of products and tools. For instance, there are credit card security issues, limited ways to pay for merchandise, older browser versions, and sites that do not update their catalogs. E-commerce web sites sell products, such as goods or services, online. They both display the products for sale and provide an easy way to complete a sales transaction. This usually involves credit card verification and automatic merchant account processing.
There are two levels of ecommerce sophistication: static and dynamic. In static, separate web pages exist for each product usually with a picture, a description, and a price. Each time the user wants to change product information they change the product's web page and upload it to the website. “Shopping Cart” functionality is a user-friendly feature and is included as standard equipment in every ecommerce hosting plan. If the user already has a website that they are happy with, and are only selling a small number of items, then a shopping cart application maybe suitable. A shopping cart enables the existing web site to take orders, and sends those orders to another application for processing. Usually, the user will have to add HTML code to the web site after every product description. (This is often referred to as “bolt-on” software.) The code will create buttons and boxes that will allow the customers to select colors, sizes and quantities, place an order, and check out. Most will allow the user to choose a design template and will then create product and category pages that already include shopping cart functions. The software generally includes a database so that adding products and updating product information requires no knowledge of HTML. The software can either be licensed outright, or rented by the month from an ASP.
These web sites can be free, meaning that there are no monthly hosting fees and there are no development costs; easy to use point-and-click templates are provided by the host. However, some costs are involved, such as per transaction fees and merchant account setup fees. In contrast, the dynamic ones have product information stored in a database and displayed dynamically per users' requests. These are never free; users must pay a monthly hosting fee and develop these sites professionally.
In addition, there are several different ways to receive funds online. A user can travel down the time-consuming yet intellectually rewarding path of building their own shopping cart. But if the user does not have programming muscles to flex, let alone the time to build something, a web storefront service maybe the way to go. When moving currency from one party to another is involved, the time, money, and craftiness needed to implement them varies.
Just as there are bodegas and high-fashion shops, there are a wide variety of store fronts. Web stores have a more uneven quality, however. Some of the poorly managed storefronts sell non-existing merchandise; lack photos where appropriate, have a lack of customer support, have hidden payment options, and employ non-electronic payment methods. The better sites have ease of searching for content, obvious pathways through the site, and frequently updated catalogs. Furthermore, they have a way to retract purchases easily, a way to confirm purchases via email or fax, and have a way to record problems.
Consumer goods can often be complex, with a product coming in different sizes, shapes, or colors. Moreover, each attribute (such as color) can have a number of options (such as green, blue, red, etc). Better software will allow an unlimited number of attributes and allow a merchant to define a store keeping unit (SKU) for each combination. A merchant may define different prices and assign different images to products that have attributes. When a customer selects a specific combination of options for such a product, the screen will change to show the merchant defined price and image for that specific SKU. Furthermore, for merchants that sell food items and non-food items, it is important to tax the order accordingly. Some software allows the merchant to define a product as either taxable or non-taxable and will calculate the total sales tax per order accordingly. Write-In-Attributes are particularly useful for merchants that sell custom products. An example of would be a company selling shirts with monograms. The customer could enter his or her monogram using the write-in-attribute. For the merchant selling hundreds to thousands of products, intuitive categorization of the product line is a must. Some software allows for an unlimited product hierarchy—others limit the number of subcategories. Merchants should make their products as easy as possible to find. Often this means putting one product in multiple categories. For optimal results, the user should be using every opportunity they have to draw customers to the web store and to increase conversions once they have a visitor.
There is a need for an invention that will enable e-commerce companies to combine their e-commerce platforms to reduce customer handling time and mistakes. Specifically, there is a need for reducing the number of scripts sent by e-business systems to the e-commerce platforms by incorporating a script builder engine into the process. The present invention provides a solution to these needs and other problems, and offers other advantages over the prior art.